Arvid's blog

Last month, the board approved a $13.5 million expansion to Garden Hills Elementary.  The district, though, started buying the land as early as October of last year and they now own all of the east side of the 1900 block of Cynthia Drive and two houses in the 2000 block.  While I applaud the district for going forward with this expansion, I do questions why all of these homes were purchases for significantly  more than their assessed value.  In one case, the home was purchased for over $54,000 more than the assessment from a family that just bought it a year ago.

I find it bothersome that the district is talking about the need to save money but is somehow in a position to purchase 6 homes at a significant markup.  I'm not a big fan of eminent domain, but I thought it had to be at a fair market value, not a huge markup.  I also find it bothersome that the purchases were done before the board approved the plans for expansion, or is that common practice? Are the funds for this coming from the new school tax that was just levied?

The state of Indiana is canceling its contract to privatize their $1.3 Billion welfare system.  From the article:

Clients, their legislators and advocates had complained that the new modernization system, which took away in-person caseworkers, loses documents, misses telephone appointments and has lengthy hold times.

Daniels said he canceled the contract because IBM did not make satisfactory progress to improve services as required by a corrective action plan.

Apparently the private sector has yet another thing it can't do better or cheaper than the public sector.

From today's News-Gazette:

"It turned out to be no different than when Blagojevich beat Judy Barr Topinka (for governor in 2006)," said Bradfield, who spent about $40,000, most of it his own money, on the campaign. "It wasn't about issues; it wasn't about ethics; it was about D (Democrat) and R (Republican)."

Or it could've been that the people didn't see the issues the same way he did, didn't like his message, didn't like his delivery, or a myriad of other reasons other than party affiliation. But sure, let's go ahead and burn that bridge with the people by calling them party lemmings. That'll help with your name recognition. It's like he's taking lessons from the Rob McColley Finishing School for Political Campaigns. Also, congrats on comparing your electability to be on par with someone who couldn't beat Blagojevich in a three-way race with a liberal third-party candidate who pulled 10% of the vote away from the Democratic candidate, even while the clouds of political corruption swirled around said Democratic candidate.

He said his campaign commissioned a poll in March that showed Prussing with 54 percent of the vote and himself with 33 percent, almost the exact outcome of Tuesday's election. "That was when I had 20 percent name recognition" and before most of his campaign advertisements, including his "Bradfield means jobs" campaign, began to air, Bradfield said. "The numbers never moved a penny because it was D and R," he said.

One would think that such a poll would be commissioned much earlier than a month before the election, when most people have their minds made up on who they'll vote for. I can't imagine how even larger of a defeat it would have been had he not been first on the ballot. Perhaps the margin would be 25% instead of 21%.

He said he believes all the money he spent on the campaign will likely pay off in increased name recognition."I gave it my best shot," he said. "I hope people appreciate I ran an honorable and honest campaign."

While I respect him for having the cojones to run for office, "honorable and honest" is not a phrase I would attribute to his campaign. His borderline crackpot theories on ethics violations, the hypocrisy on running an "anonymous" attack site while at the same time complaining about anonymous attacks being orchestrated by the opposition. I could go on and on, but at least now we'll have a couple more years of folksy anecdotes before he decides to lose another race.

Just a few notes for the Rex Bradfield campaign to keep in mind when they make attack websites and then try to pass it off as not being from them:

• bradfieldformayor.com is registered with GoDaddy.com, and coincidentally, so is laurelprussingmayor.com.  RobMcColley.com is registered through Dreamhost and has a different address, as does electkruse.org.
• While bradfieldformayor.com clearly shows that it is registered to Rex, laurelprussingmayor.com is using a proxy service to hide its owner, because the campaign doesn't want to be associated with that, I'm sure.
• Both sites are physically hosted by Sipep Design, a local web design firm whose portfolio has very similar designed sites, as if they came from the same template.
• However, what the campaign apparently doesn't realize is that with most hosting services, when you own a couple of domains with the same service, not only do they use the same name servers, the hosting company tends to put them all on the same web server.  Also what they don't realize, it seems, is that a proxy service may hide who owns the domain, it doesn't hide the web site's IP address, so all of this can be verified with a simple nslookup: 

DNS server handling your query: localhost
DNS server's address:    127.0.0.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    bradfieldformayor.com
Address: 216.40.254.66

Non-authoritative answer:
Name: laurelprussingmayor.com
Address: 216.40.254.66

My my, that's awfully coincidental...

So, is this how Rex is going to play?  Create a couple of attack websites, then spam them all over IP?  Color me unimpressed by a candidate who sends representatives to post on his behalf to cry about people not liking his signs, and then go and make an incredibly half-assed attemt to hide that they originated an attack site.  Why the deception?  Is his campaign trying to make it look like there are groups of citizens rising up and screaming for Bradfield?  If so, well, that's a campaign strategy made of FAIL.

So, any more drive-by's wanna address this and repudiate my claim?

(Edited to clarify a couple of sentences, and add the info about the hosting company that I forgot to mention until someone pointed it out in email)

Please, B is for Business, tell us again how this this whole thing is the fault of the consumer, and those poor businesses got the short end of the stick.

GM Owner's manual (video does not embed)

As requested several months ago, allow me to bring out Mark Shelden's prediction that Biden was a blunder of a choice and "a dream come true" for the GOP.  Of note is Mark's declaration that :

It’s time to start figuring out how McCain stacks up against Hillary in 2012. 

Care to eat your words, Mark? :)

Something that really sticks out in an after-the-fact kind of way, we have this gem from Dan Fielding when talking about McCain's VP selection (pre-Palin selection):

I guess McCain better not pick Romney or any other GOP primary oppenents who criticized him, eh?"

Right.  He needs a currently serving governor whose support is credible.

There are several other interesting points that are made in the referenced thread, such as the beginnings of Run4cvrlib's seething hatred of the MSM, but I just wanted to point out what was requested, where Biden supposedly marked the downfall of Obama's campaign.

For all the smears, lies, half-truths, and other Rovian tactics directed at Barack, he was able to overcome it all and we finally now have the President that this great country deserves.

America is finally back on the right track.

Print yourself out a card and play along at home during tonight's debates.  A good time to be had by all.

Cue irrational defense of Palin and how the media makes her look stupid from Run4cvrlib and/or John Maloney...

Depending on the source, either the community of Rossville wants to learn more about their witches, or hates them and are afraid their kids will start playing with potions and putting hexes on people.  Either way, the local religious community hosted an open meeting about it.

According to the News-Gazette last week, it was just a polite gathering organized by local churches to remind Christians to be Christians and to learn more about the Wiccans.  However, according to the Chicago Tribune, the local churches started blasting the Wiccans (complete with a billboard denouncing their beliefs) and organized the meeting to plan for "further steps".  About the only similarity to the story was that the guest lecturer gave a presentation on Wiccans and encouraged them to be Christian.

It's sad when the News-Gazette can't even get local news right, and they basically get scooped by the Tribune two days after their original story runs.

The News-Gazette today reported that you can now get energy credits in Illinois.

Illinoisans who buy solar panels, wind generators or other types of renewable energy equipment can now get a little more bang for their buck.

Gov. Rod Blagojevich recently signed legislation creating a statewide net-metering program, which means customers can use excess power they generate through such equipment as a credit against electricity they buy from their utility company. In a year when electricity rates jumped significantly, that could make a big difference in a customer's bill.

Ameren apparently didn't offer this before, but says they're not opposed to it. It'll be interesting to see how many people make the conversion. If I didn't have a huge big shady tree on the east side of my house, thereby limiting that side's exposure to sunlight, it would be a lot more attractive to me. Maybe if I put them on top of the garage?

Recently the US Military confirmed that it sought to build a "gay bomb".

The theory apparently is that they would drop this hormone bomb on enemy troops to "turn them homosexual", and thereby make them more interested in sex than fighting.

Our tax dollars at work, I guess...